If you just watched my video on Hathor, you saw that there were a few little
customizations that you could make to the Hathor template, and maybe you
were feeling jealous.
You want to use isis, but you'd like to customize the look of isis as well.
What kind of customizations are available for that?
Well, that's what I am going to cover now.
If we go to Extensions, and we go to our Template Manager, let's take a look at
the isis template by clicking on it here, inside of our Styles.
And the first screen just gives us the style name, and the template that it's
associated with, but under Options, we do have some things that we can change
here, which is incredibly helpful.
So first of all, one of the things that we can change is the color of the
navigation bar, or the color of the header.
So we can change the colors that are associated with these two bars up here at
the top of the screen.
By default, these are various shades of blue;
you could make them shades of red, shades of green, whatever you want to do.
The logo is available here as well.
By default, you see a Joomla! logo.
It brands this back-end as Joomla! running here.
But in many cases, there are Web site development agencies that might wish to
brand their copy of Joomla as their own.
So perhaps they want to use their own company colors, and they want to use their
own company logo in the back-end here, so that this does not say that this is
Joomla!, it looks more like a custom content management system.
And that's possible; we can change the logo assignment here by changing
this particular item.
The next item about collapsing the Administrator Menu solves this
particular problem.
Sometimes when I am working at home on my super large monitor, I have one
browser window open, and maybe I've made it a little bit smaller, and then on the
other side of the screen, I've got a Word document open, or my e-mail, or something,
and I want to be going back and forth between those.
When I minimize the size of my browser by pulling in the corner here, what
happens, of course, in isis that's a feature, not a bug, is that at some point
right here, the menu collapses, and now I don't have the ability to roll my
mouse over the menu options up here on the top anymore. Now I have to click on
this icon to get to these options here underneath, and then click on each of
these to go even further.
I don't have the ability to click on these right now, because I have this
open down here on the bottom, and the menu is normally grayed out at this point in time.
If you don't want this change to happen; if you would like to have the menu to
stay constant here across the top, what you're going to need to do is, down
here where it says Collapse Administrator Menu, right now that's set to Yes, change that to No,
and if I just say Save, what will happen now is, as my window is wide, I have my
menu, but as I make my browser window smaller, the menu does not collapse.
I still have it up here, and it's still available to me.
So that's helpful if you're working on a desktop computer, and maybe you have no
intention of working on this site ever on a tablet, or a mobile phone, so that's
a feature you can turn on and off.
So I am going to go ahead and put that back to Yes, because I actually like that there.
We can choose to display the header on the top of the page, or not;
if I say No, and say Save, that header bar that tells me where I am in the
Web site, and has the Joomla!
logo on it goes away entirely.
I kind of like it there, because I like the fact that it tells me what page I am on.
Although it tells me twice;
it tells me up here, and it will replace that down here if you decide to turn
off the header. I like it better up here in the blue bar. It just works better for me.
And down here on the bottom of the screen, there is this module, which says View
Site, and has the Log out button, and so forth on it, right now that is set to be
Fixed at the bottom of the page.
We can move that around as well.
If I said put it at the Top of the screen,
that is going to bump that up here to the top, so I don't have it down here in the bottom.
Some people may like that better here in the workflow.
So I am going to go ahead and put that back down to the bottom.
And the last thing that we can customize here inside of isis, down here at the
bottom, is the Sticky Toolbar.
And this refers to the buttons for Save, Save & Close, and so forth, are always
available to us, no matter how long the page is.
So if I set my Sticky Toolbar to No, and say Save, what will happen now is, as I
go into a page that's a bit longer, like this, those buttons will scroll off the screen.
The dark blue bar here that has your navigation on it will always stay in place,
but the bar with the buttons to save will scroll off.
I actually think that this is not a good thing; I love having those
buttons there on the top.
So if I've scrolled all the way down many screens of information, I can still
just click on the Save button at the top, rather than having to scroll back up to
the top, and then click save.
So I am going to turn that back on, and I am going to say Save & Close.
So you have many options to you for customizing the isis template.
You can brand it with your own colors, and your own logo very easily, without
having to edit the HTML and the CSS.
You can move some of the elements around to optimize your personal workflow,
and you can optimize isis for your particular workflow, and to maximize your
productivity.